Abstract: Most OpenClaw downtime is not caused by one catastrophic bug, but by a chain of small issues handled without a repeatable process. This article gives a practical SetupClaw troubleshooting playbook for the incidents that appear most often in real deployments: webhook breaks, auth confusion, rate limits, and restart-related regressions. The goal is simple: recover faster without weakening your security posture under pressure.

SetupClaw troubleshooting playbook: webhooks, auth, rate limits, and restart incidents on Hetzner

When an assistant goes quiet, most teams do one of two things. They either panic-reboot everything, or they start changing settings at random until something works. Both approaches sometimes restore service. Neither is reliable.

Start with a triage order you never improvise

The biggest reliability gain usually comes from the first five minutes. If your triage order is inconsistent, your mean time to recovery rises even when the root cause is simple.

A practical sequence is:

1. Check service health (openclaw status, gateway status).
2. Run diagnostics (openclaw doctor).
3. Tail logs live (openclaw logs --follow).
4. Run channel-specific checks (Telegram/webhook/auth path).
5. Validate config and runtime paths.
6. Only then perform controlled restart/recovery.

This order prevents premature fixes that mask the real cause.

Webhook incidents are usually routing mismatches, not mystery failures

Webhook outages often look random from the outside. In practice, they are usually one of three things: wrong path, wrong method, or wrong edge routing.

The safest way to debug is layered. Test local endpoint behaviour first, then proxy/tunnel routing, then provider registration details. If local endpoint behaviour is wrong, edge changes cannot fix it. If local behaviour is correct and edge routing is wrong, app config changes are usually the wrong move.

This sounds obvious. It is still the step teams skip when they are in a hurry.

Auth failures are often state and path problems

Authentication incidents are frequently misclassified as “token is broken.” Sometimes that is true. Often the issue is path or runtime context.

Common causes include: token mismatch between client and config, env vars not visible to the running service, wrong profile/state path, or a network exposure change made without matching auth expectations.

The lesson is that auth is layered. You need the right credential and the right runtime context that can actually read it.

Rate-limit incidents need policy, not guesswork

Rate limits feel external because they often come from providers. But your response policy is internal and controllable.

You can decide retry behaviour, backoff timing, escalation thresholds, and fallback routing. Without those decisions documented, teams oscillate between over-retrying (causing more throttling) and under-retrying (failing tasks too early).

A practical playbook distinguishes transient provider throttling from local app faults, then applies bounded retries and clear operator escalation points.

Restart incidents should be expected events, not fire drills

A restart is not inherently a failure. It should be an expected lifecycle event with a recovery checklist.

After restart, verify service supervision, startup health, channel reconnect state, and scheduled-job continuity. If you skip these checks, you can have a healthy process with unhealthy workflows, which is often worse because it looks fine at a glance.

Treat restart verification as standard operations, not emergency behaviour.

Cron checks belong in post-incident recovery

If your assistant runs reminders and scheduled work, restart recovery is incomplete until cron is validated.

Check enabled flags, timezone assumptions, recent run history, and run a controlled smoke test. Without this step, teams often discover cron drift hours later when a promised reminder never arrives.

Reliable automation is mostly about closing these “it seemed fine” gaps.

Telegram “down” does not always mean gateway “down”

A common panic pattern is assuming Telegram silence equals full platform outage. Sometimes the gateway is healthy and the issue is channel policy, allowlist, mention-gating, or route context.

This is why channel-specific diagnosis matters. It prevents full-stack restarts when the real issue is local to transport or authorisation policy.

In other words, separate transport health from policy health.

Memory and incident handling should reinforce each other

Every resolved incident should become reusable operational memory: symptom, root cause, fix, and verification command.

Without that, each outage starts from zero and teams repeat the same debugging loops. With it, recovery gets faster and safer because prior decisions are retrievable and testable.

This is one of the most practical uses of hybrid memory in SetupClaw operations.

Incident fixes should still respect PR-only discipline

When incidents involve config or script changes, the pressure to hot-edit production is high. Sometimes temporary mitigation is necessary. Permanent fixes should still flow through reviewed PRs.

Why? Because emergency changes without audit trail are a common source of repeat incidents. PR-only discipline is not just for feature work. It is also a reliability control for operations.

Practical implementation steps

Step one: publish a one-page incident matrix

List top incidents with symptoms, likely causes, exact commands, expected output, rollback path, and escalation owner.

Step two: standardise triage commands

Use the same first-command sequence for every incident so diagnosis is comparable across operators.

Step three: separate failure classes explicitly

Tag incidents as webhook, auth, rate-limit, restart, or scheduler recovery. Avoid blended “everything is broken” tickets.

Step four: add post-restart validation as policy

Do not mark incidents resolved until channel reconnect and cron smoke tests pass.

Step five: capture and store incident summaries

Write short, durable notes for each resolved incident to reduce repeat MTTR.

Step six: review reliability KPIs weekly

Track recovery time, repeat-incident rate, and post-restart stability to catch drift before it becomes routine downtime.

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Originally published on clawsetup.co.uk. If you want a secure, reliable OpenClaw setup on your own Hetzner VPS — see how we can help.